Prize-winning Swiss novelist Roland Buti writes novels that seem at first glance to be charmingly bucolic. Indeed, his most recent novel, Grand National, does take us from the gree
Philippe Jaccottet was born in 1925 in Switzerland, but has lived in France since the mid-1940s. Apart from poetry, he also writes prose and essays; his bibliography is several doz
Reading this book is like walking through an amusement park. Actually no, that would be too artificial, too unreal, while the book is so very real; there is something authentic and
This is the second volume in English of Arno Camenisch’s Alpine trilogy, preceded by The Alp and concluded by Last Last Orders. The trilogy, set in a Grisons / Graubünden valley
The 2018 reissue of Beat Sterchi’s Cow (‘Blösch’), in Michael Hofmann’s vigorous translation, is a major literary event. When first published in 1983, Sterchi’s novel wo
The poetry of the Swiss-Italian poet Fabio Pusterla has a distinctively Alpine touch to it; his work feels well suited to the environment of the High Alps, where rugged unforgiving
Fleur Jaeggy has been writing concise, unsettling works of fiction for four decades. Her haunting prose is all the more addictive for being doled out in slim portions. The publishe
Readers not familiar with crime fiction often wrongly assume that the only thing driving such stories forwards is answering the mystery of ‘whodunit’. In reality, good crime fi
When we encounter very poetic poetry, do we view it as it was read when it was written? Not just in terms of its era, and not just in terms of its original language (if it’s tran
‘Is this what a broken man looks like?’ asks the first narrator in One Hundred Days, Lukas Bärfuss’s novel about the Rwandan genocide, seamlessly translated by Tess Lewis. H
